Remembrance And ‘Defiance’

A scene form the film “Defiance” starring Daniel Craig which was released on DVD this week.

A scene form the film “Defiance” starring Daniel Craig which was released on DVD this week.

by Joshua Fattal

‘I’m telling less to be able to tell more,” the great American director Edward Zwick (of “Blood Diamond” and “Glory”) told me about his film “Defiance.” I was a little startled by his remark because I did not see less in “Defiance” — I actually saw more than I had ever before seen in film about one of the most inspiring episodes in Jewish history.

“Defiance” is a deep and beautifully crafted film. It tells a story about Jews who defied the odds and oppressed their oppressors; it is one of the greatest tales of Jewish resistance in the Holocaust.
The film is a rare hybrid of beauty with a profound message. The subject of “Defiance” is the invincible Jewish will to

live, the stubborn and sublime Jewish refusal to be dehumanized by persecution and destruction.

The movie, starring Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell, was created from Nechama Tec’s book of the same name. It tells the story of Tuvia Bielski and his brothers in Byelorussia on the run after their parents are murdered in December 1941 by the invading Nazi armies. The movie recounts the formation by the brothers of their resistance organization in the forest which started with a few survivors of the local massacres and grew into a small society of over 1000 Jews in hiding.

Beginning with real footage of the Nazi invasion, Zwick quickly sets the powerful tone of the film and anyone watching “Defiance” feels the relentless and desperate plight of the Jews.

Within the first five minutes, the background of the characters and the direction of the movie are clear. Zwick told me in a telephone interview that he wanted to get right into the story and let the story tell itself.
A two second scene means the most. Fleeing their house after their parents are killed, the Bielski brothers peel off the mezuzah from the wall and keep it for good luck – which was an absurd thing to do considering the circumstances. (Later in the film the mezuzah stops a bullet and saves Zus’ life.) With this scene the movie immediately takes on an emotional level for any Jew: this story of a band of rebels is not about people who are like us — we have never been tested as they were and never been called upon to show such courage — and yet the movie feels like a movie about and for all Jews.

Zwick wanted to tell the realistic story of these survivors, not an idealistic fairy-tale. Craig’s Tuvia, like the real Tuvia, murders the family of the Nazi commander who killed his parents. While this at first seems contrary to the lofty message of the movie, its purpose becomes clear: these Jews are human beings. They are experiencing the full range of emotions, including the desire for revenge, and as Tuvia deals with the aftermath of slaughtering the Nazis we too understand the pain he is going through.

A Russian partisan leader comes up to Tuvia and bluntly says, “But Jews do not fight.” Craig responds, a little too much like a movie hero, with “these Jews do.” The comment is correct. Tuvia Bielski was a real hero, a real Jewish hero.

Jews were not led to the slaughter as many people seem to believe. Some of them fought back. Liev Schreiber’s character Zus Bielsky represents the most radical of Jews, killing the Nazi oppressors as a means of feeling personal satisfaction. But as the movie explores Zus’ violence, it simultaneously and eloquently shows Jamie Bell’s character getting married, delightfully contrasting the bitterness of one Jew to the happiness of another. The marriage is a side story throughout the movie, but one that is essential to its theme of the enduring humanity of these Jews.

From one obstacle and atrocity to the next, more and more people join the Bielski otriad (the Russian name for a partisan group). As Tuvia Bielski realizes that thousands of Jews are now under his command, he acts more and more like a leader.

When he rides in on a shining white horse, an effect that could have been done more subtly, he demonstrates he is in control. And when he later slaughters the white horse for the starving people to eat, he proves that he is commanding the group without illusions and that every day of freedom is like an act of faith. The film concludes with the Bielskis still in the middle of their struggle, preparing to fight on and on.

“Defiance” successfully relates the story of several Jewish partisans but also the story of the fight for Jewish survival. During a year when numerous Holocaust films were released, Zwick’s “Defiance” brilliantly stood out.

Zwick talked to me about the impact of his film upon Holocaust survivors, including members of the Bielski families. It gave them “an opportunity to express something to their children that they could never have expressed accurately.”

Growing up in an environment where the memory of the Holocaust has been a daily reality and taking in all the stories of my maternal grandparents, Mark Wieseltier z”l and Stella Wieseltier, I have always been emotionally and intellectually attached to the Shoah. In fact, my mother’s family spent their summers with Tuvia Bielski and his family in the Catskills and knew them well.

After watching the movie my mother, Thea Wieseltier Fattal, commented, “I always knew that the quiet man in the bungalow colony was a great hero, but when I saw “Defiance” I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he actually did.” (At a screening in New York, my mother and my uncle were reunited with Tuvia’s son, their childhood playmate.)

But “Defiance” was not the story of my family, I was seeing a different perspective, a different experience of the Holocaust. From Liev Schreiber’s powerful acting to the extraordinary recreation of the forest and the ghetto where our ancestors fought and lived, “Defiance” left me with a powerful feeling of pride. This tale made me proud to be a Jew. It also provoked many questions. Who else fought back? How did they endure? Where else did such a story happen? Were any of my own relatives saved by such brave Jews?
Zwick shared a remarkable experience with me. When he took his film crew into the beautiful Lithuanian forest that served as the location for his depiction of the Byelorussian forest, he noticed footprints on the ground. He realized that the spot on which he was standing could have been the actual site of a mass grave from the early 1940s. The Jewish community in Lithuania had once been 300,000, now only about 1,000 Jews remained.

“There was no substitute for that, to be on that hallowed ground,” the director reminisced. On Friday night the extras, most of whom were not even Jewish, made kiddush in the forest. Most of the film crew was not Jewish and the sight of Jews holding cups of wine and saying a blessing was utterly new to them. And yet most of the crew came together to say kiddush in the woods. That is the true legacy of “Defiance.”

Joshua Fattal is a junior at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn.

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